Extraordinary Rendition (13 page)

He clicked on the blue bar. The vaudeville-shaped, gloved hand and fingers on the screen pulsed, and the email opened. He immediately saw that the report Hal Rana had given to him had been sent to “Sesame Star.” He opened the attachment. Someone had scanned the secret thirty-five page report into the email. Byron Carlos Johnson knew he hadn’t done that, since his computer skills were limited to email (he didn’t even know how to create an attachment) and access to the search engines. He had only recently learned that the word “Google” was no longer just the name of a company but a verb, “to Google.” He was still learning how to use the beautifully engineered BlackBerry Christina had given him.

The email to “SesameStar” consumed his attention. Who was SesameStar? How had the paper report been scanned into the computer, making it a permanently embedded part of the ether of this new world? He thought about the promise Hal Rana had extracted, and which Byron had made, to keep the document a secret.

Naked, slightly chilly even in the hot apartment, Byron walked to the bedroom. Christina, her hair spread over the pillow and her gorgeous body now completely uncovered, was asleep. He heard her steady breathing. He let her sleep. It took a full hour of fitfulness for Byron Johnson to drift into sleep as he watched the television images of bulky American soldiers walking across the shattered, moon-like surface of Afghanistan.

Christina Rosario’s apartment was one of those roomy West Side apartments that Byron had always admired, even though he had never lived in one. There were intricately carved moldings along the seams where the walls and ceilings met. There were free-standing radiators from which the metallic paint was peeling. The bookcases along the walls were filled with books, thousands of them. The floors were brown and black parquet inlaid at angles to one another. The sink, shower stall, and built-in clothes hamper were from the fifties; they were white relics that still worked. There were two faucets on the sink, as in the bathtub, for hot and cold water. The sofas were deep, soft, and somewhat frayed.

Christina had told him that her father, now dead, had been a professor of engineering at Columbia. Her mother, a woman who wrote children’s books under the pseudonym Raquel Rematti (Christina called it her mother’s
nom de guerre
) lived in
Paris with an Italian man twenty years younger than she was. Christina was raised in the apartment until she was fourteen, when she was sent to a boarding school in New England. Her mother still owned the apartment.

Wearing only underpants, Christina walked drowsily into the kitchen at first light as Byron sipped coffee. “How long have you been up, Carlos?”

“A little while. I found it hard to sleep.”

“Really? I didn’t hear you. I must have been out like the proverbial light.”

“You slept like a baby. Glad I didn’t wake you.”

He poured a cup of coffee and held it aloft for her.

“It’s early, Carlos. What time is it, anyway?”

“Six or so.”

“My first class isn’t until eleven.” She draped her bare arms over his shoulders. “Why don’t you come back to bed? We can mess around for a bit, and I guarantee you the sleep of the pure at heart.”

“You shameless hussy. Love to do it, but I made arrangements to visit Ali this morning. I want to read that report again, more carefully this time.”

She was fragrant with the sweet smell of sleep. As she continued to drape her arms over his shoulders her hair brushed his face.

Byron said, “I don’t want to keep you awake, honey, but something’s bothering me.”

More alert and less seductively drowsy than she had been, Christina said, “What’s the matter, Carlos?”

“When I got up at three I did what I always do these days. I’ve become as addicted to the computer as a teenager.”

“Wait until you get to be a CrackBerry head. You’ll be one of those zombies walking down Park Avenue never, ever looking up.”

Now more serious, Byron said, “My sent screen showed an email to a screen name I’ve never heard of.”

“What screen name?”

“Take a look.”

Byron clicked on the blue line.

“SesameStar?”

“Look familiar?” he asked.

“Is it for Bert or Ernie?”

“Your generation, not mine.” She was standing over his left shoulder. He turned and looked up at her. “There’s an attachment.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“The memo Rana gave me. The one you saw me reading last night.”

“The secret one?”

Byron nodded. “And now SesameStar has it. You know more about these things than I do: is there some directory, some way to find out who SesameStar is?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

“And how could anyone use my email account to send a message to a name I’ve never seen?”

“I don’t know, Carlos.”

Placing the leaning arrow of the cursor over the X at the upper right corner of the screen, Byron closed his email. He stood up. The robe he wore fell open. “Let’s get ready for our day. I need to be down at the prison soon. And you need to go learn all about criminal procedure.”

She touched his face. “Carlos, this is strange. Are you worried?”

“No. Intrigued, I think, is the right word.” He patted her naked rear.

“How’s about showering with me?”

“You’d tire me out. I want to be alert for my day. And you need to get ready for class.”

Byron Johnson poured a cup of black coffee. His heart was racing. He listened to the water throbbing as Christina showered. He glanced out at Riverside Park from the kitchen window. It was early dawn. Two or three people, indistinct, ran along the park’s pathways.

He walked down the long, book-lined hallway that led from the kitchen to the bedroom. He was possessed by that pre-dawn sense of dread that had arrived as soon as he’d woken up. Someone had said to him years ago, in a context he could not remember, “Your first thought of the day is your worst thought.”

Byron had intended to do something challenging when he volunteered to represent someone charged with terrorism. He’d never anticipated—and this lack of foresight troubled him—that so many people would be so alienated, that the vicious, right-wing pandering Rush Limbaugh would incessantly call him that “candy-ass, stuck-up idiot,” and that he’d fall in love with and constantly crave a beautiful woman who was the same age as his own sons.

And he began to recognize something else he hadn’t foreseen. There were times when, on the streets and in restaurants,
he sensed that men were watching him. There were sometimes resonant voids when he used his cell phone. There were unexpected surprises on his computer, such as the appearance of “SesameStar.”

Have I ever
, he wondered,
been afraid
?

To distract himself from the anxiety, he glanced at the books on the crowded shelves in the hallway. What suddenly caught his attention was that the books consisted of all the usual classics—Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne, Hemingway, and some recent novels still in their shiny dust jackets. There was even a copy of the Modern Library edition of
The Moonstone
, the book he had been reading on his trips back and forth to Miami.

And then he realized that of all the books on the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, there was not a single engineering or technical or scientific book in this apartment in which Christina’s father, a Columbia engineering professor, had lived for thirty years.

T
OM NASHATKA, WITH ANDREW Hurd just behind him, pressed the grimy buzzer of the storefront on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The neon sign on the window read
Money Orders, Etcetera
. Nashatka looked down the long, barren, and unoccupied entrance of the store. At the far end was a counter sealed off from the customer area by double layers of protective, shatter-proof glass. Three or four people stood behind the counter. One customer, an enormous black woman, was leaning toward the speaker in the glass partition. It was ten in the morning.

When the buzzer at the front door finally sounded and the magnetic lock disengaged, Tom Nashatka entered the store as Andrew Hurd pushed a city trash can between the open door and the frame. Nashatka walked steadily forward. Behind him, Hurd and seven uniformed U.S. Marshals filled the room, moving forward. The black woman turned and started to scream. And in the closed off area, the three women and one man began running toward a metal door behind them.

Calmly, Nashatka pressed a badge against the scratched security window at the counter. He shouted, “Police. Let me see your hands. Unlock the door and step out.”

As if staring into a cloudy fishbowl, Nashatka watched a slender, elegant man, probably Pakistani, emerge through the rear door. He had a prematurely gray beard but absolutely
black, glistening hair. He moved gracefully, deliberately. He reached toward the counter and knocked the two laptop computers to the floor. From under the counter, as he ignored Nashatka’s pounding on the glass, the man took out a hammer. He knelt over the computers and began hitting them. They fractured like plastic toys.

As though calmly painting a portrait, the man continued to smash the smaller and smaller pieces even while the battering ram, wielded by Nashatka and one of the uniformed marshals, struck the frame of the bulletproof door in the window barrier. The door fell backwards, intact, its hinges detached from the frame. The man dropped the hammer and simply stood over the pieces of the computer. Nashatka and the other men who entered the room had their pistols out. “Hands in the air, hands in the air.”

The elegant man raised his hands. Nashatka hit him in the chest with his fist, a powerful blow, and the man collapsed. One of the marshals held a pistol to his head as another put plastic handcuffs on him. The man was groaning. A puffy red foam blew out of his nostrils with each breath he took.

When Nashatka saw that no piece of the laptops larger than a sliver remained, he kicked the man just below the rib cage. The women were screaming. One of the marshals touched Nashatka on the shoulder and said, “Sir,” as though cautioning him.

Nashatka looked around the room with the fast, all-encompassing movement of a receiver in a football game. He said, “I want every security camera in here ripped out of the wall. Give them all to me before we leave. Don’t inventory them.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t fucking put them on the inventory sheet. I’ll secure them.”

Byron’s sparely furnished, high-ceilinged apartment had tall windows. His apartment was higher than most of the three or four story buildings that still dominated the old warehouse area, and he enjoyed the sense of light that filled his living room and kitchen—actually, there were no walls between the living room and kitchen areas in the huge apartment—during the day. And he loved to look out the big windows at night: there were all the sparkling lights of the city and, to the north, the immense tower that was the Empire State Building, its top always illuminated by at least three different colors. Tonight the lights on the spire were white, green, and blue.

Christina was as uninhibited as he was about walking either barely dressed or naked in the apartment at night, with the windows unobstructed by shades or curtains. They kept only dim lights on in the apartment at night. Traces of the bedroom, and of Byron and Christina, were always visible at night because the television, resonant with sound and vibrant with images, was always on. When they spent the night at Byron’s apartment, they lay in bed watching Charlie Rose’s interviews from eleven to twelve and then, before either making love again or falling asleep, watched the local news just after midnight. They often lay naked on top of the crisp sheets that Byron’s housekeeper changed every day—a practice that was a holdover from the years when Byron had lived with his wife and sons on Fifth Avenue.

The late-night anchor was a literate, extremely precise Asian woman, no older than thirty, with an unaccented, chirpy voice. Christina focused on the woman’s story before Byron did. “Federal agents and local police,” the anchor said, “conducted raids today on three separate money exchange stores with links to terrorism. One of the stores is in the Bronx. Another is in Fort Lee, New Jersey. And the third, also in New Jersey, is in Irvington.”

“Carlos,” Christina whispered as Byron read an old Modern Library edition of
Moby Dick
, “listen to this.”

Suddenly Byron Johnson was no longer drifting toward a refreshing, longed-for sleep. He stared at the televised images of the three raided store fronts. The signs bore the names that Ali Hussein had given him that morning:
Abad’s Carnival Ice Cream, It’s Your Money, Money Orders, Etcetera
. Hesitantly, quietly, Hussein had almost whispered and then repeated those names as part of the long process by which he seemed to gradually give up information while he became more confident in Byron. He wrote down the names on a yellow legal pad; Ali said he had done part-time accounting work for them.

Hawala
. That, Hussein told him, was the Arabic word for money transfer stores that acted, as Western Union had for many years, as places where United States dollars could be sent by wire to family members in distant countries and converted into the local currencies.
Hawala
. Byron had never heard the word before, and he wrote it that morning in large, blocky letters next to the names of each of the stores, names that now flashed on the screen.